Edwin Morgan, 1920-2010

The poet and translator Edwin Morgan has died at the age of 90 in his beloved home city of Glasgow. David Hayes salutes a "Glasgow internationalist and Scottish universalist", who made the world new for generations of readers.

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Edwin Morgan, a poet of endless variousness and transformative insight, died on 19 August 2010 at the age of 90 in his beloved home city of Glasgow. A life of protean achievement that encompassed service in north Africa in the second world war, many years of teaching English literature at Glasgow University, translation (from Hungarian, Russian, Anglo-Saxon, French, Cambodian...), verse-plays, critical essays, and many styles of poetry, has ended.

Edwin Morgan's mind-bending work - from The Second Life (1968) to From Glasgow to Saturn (1973), from The New Divan (1977) to Hold Hands Among the Atoms (1991), from Nothing Not Giving Messages (a book of interviews, published on his 70th birthday) to A Book of Lives (2007), and so much more - made the world new for generations of readers. His modernist intelligence, scrupulous critical voice and searching judgment taught many by example how to think for themselves. The warm, gentle presence of a beautiful, generous man enriched those privileged to know him.

And always, at the centre of his work - at once wellspring, subject-matter, inspiration, forcefield, human community, imaginary focus, and inexhaustible resource - there was both a native city and a native country. Edwin Morgan was a Glasgow internationalist and a Scottish universalist. He lived multiple connections to the world while belonging to a corner of it, each aspect containing and enriching the other. His boundary-less imagination taught many Scots to understand that intense attachment to home and place, to literary tradition and political community, need not entail a retreat from the world but could be a way of joining and recognising it in all its exhilirating complexity. In this, his influence on Scotland in the late 20th century - animated by his pathbreaking Sonnets from Scotland (1984) - was as profound as any public figure's. Perhaps, indeed, its true measure is yet to come in the 21st.

Edwin Morgan's work, a nourishing ocean, will live and reverberate in minds and hearts for as long as poetry is read. Today, the children of his heart can only mourn.